Until I see the bot this year, or until I see the other 98% of my competitors sites in the Jeeves index, I'm tempted to consider these crawling like crazy posts to be the equivalent of Elvis sightings.

Yep - I would agree with the Elvis analogy. But I got visited across multiple sites and a new site got 2276 pages requested in a couple of hours. That is probably more pages that have ever been requested by AJ bot in the past two years on all my sites.

site:www.domain.com domain seems to provide better results than inurl:www.domain.com - see the results for inurl:www.amazon.co.uk on ask.co.uk for example.

Ask Jeeves has been crawling a few of my sites heavily for the last few months, so much so I had to upgrade my hosting (1.3million hits so far this month on one site). But Ask Jeeves does now provide 33% of the volume of visits that Google does, so it has been worth it for me.

Teoma has been lighting us up for about 30,000 combined hits a day for a while now. While the traffic isn't as nice as Yahoo or MSN, it's about equal to Google. The bot is reasonably polite. Hard to turn it off when it's actually returning something.